Straight Cut (16 page)

If it started again now, I wasn’t going to like it. In an effort to distract myself, I wound up thinking about the knife I’d given Kevin. Bad luck. I was convinced it was really bad luck now. But was it coming to him or me?

Then I was through the mountains at last. I took the highway north of Nice toward Lyon, Dijon, Calais. Someone in a serious hurry might have made the channel in a day, but I let it take me two. Time was not a critical factor, so far as I was concerned, though some might have said it should have been. My attitude wasn’t completely tuned to the circumstances and I wasn’t sure I wanted it to be. Somewhere a little better than halfway I made a buttonhook off the
autoroute
and found a tolerable hotel to spend the night in. I got a deluxe meal, which I could afford on the cheap franc, and forced a little conversation on the man who ran the place. My French, while not good, was a lot better than my Italian, and I wanted to brush it up some in case I needed it seriously in Belgium. In the morning I got up early and took off driving again.

I had not been in Calais before and I was looking forward to a pretty old seaport town. It had slipped my mind that the entire city had been bombed to dust during World War II. Rebuilt Calais was a quick job of jerry-rigging and ugly as sin. I checked into a no-star hotel, a hideous pile of brown concrete, and then went out to turn in the car. Walking back to the hotel, I stopped in a second-hand clothes store and bought a shirt, a tie, and a slightly seedy gray business suit. Back in my room, I put it all on before I went down to the dining room, where I had my worst meal yet in France. But I could watch myself in the mirrors that lined one wall, and I thought I looked about right — like a second-rate middle-aged businessman, too dull for anyone to bother about.

I caught a morning boat for Dover. It was a pleasant crossing, though the weather was a little iffy. There was a menacing shelf of purple cloud on the west horizon, and the water kept changing from green to gray. I thought we were probably making it just ahead of a storm. Most of the trip I spent sitting on the stern deck, where I drank a couple of stiff gins, the best the boat had to offer, to brace myself for customs. I had no story to explain why I couldn’t open that briefcase. The gins helped, though, and by the time the chalk cliffs came into view I felt capable of ad-libbing if there was trouble.
Do what Kevin would do. Wing it.
There was no problem. I stated my intentions, tourism, and went through without a luggage check. Maybe the suit worked, or maybe they just weren’t in the mood. No more car rentals. I decided I wasn’t up to driving on the wrong side of the road. I got a taxi and then caught the train for London. Aboard the train, I discovered how tired I finally was, and for maybe a couple of hours I slept. I woke up disoriented. It was peculiar to hear people around me speaking English again. That I could understand it didn’t really seem to help.

I took the tube from Victoria to Paddington, remembering that there was a lot of cheap lodging around the second station. In the lobby I picked up a handful of rooming house flyers and took them to a pub counter to go through. Most of them were twelve-pound-a-night bed-and-breakfasts, riddled with curfews and visitor restrictions. They would not do. Then there was an ad for “efficiency flats,” by day or by week, a nice glossy brochure, with fish-eye photographs in color. “Suitable for military personnel,” it said.

The place was just off Leinster Square, an easy walk from the station. The entrance was not nearly so prepossessing as the flyer might have led me to expect, but I was tired and in a hurry and hadn’t believed the flyer in the first place. I went in and negotiated. The best lies are the ones that have the most truth built into them, and I told the manager (a lady of a certain age) that I was a film editor and (with a judicious amount of winking and smirking) that though I was traveling on a tourist visa I was actually scouting for work. I would be in and out, possibly absent for a week or more at a stretch, but I wanted the place nailed down for a month. Cash in advance, provided she was willing to make a minor adjustment in the weekly rate, which, after some argument, she was.

I paid up, claimed my key, and went up the stairs. To call the place a flat of any kind was a masterpiece of euphemism. There was one room and a tiny bath. The kitchen facilities consisted of a hot plate and a miniature refrigerator, which did, I was pleased to note, contain a couple of ice trays. There were two dingy armchairs, a small table edged with cigarette burns, where a plain dial telephone sat, and a window which was painted shut. The bed folded into the wall, and a smell of mildew leaked from its niche. The place would have made a good set for a suicide.

I went out. There were plenty of other little hotels in Leinster Square and Prince’s Square, but none of them would have been any better. On the Bayswater Road, near the corner of Kensington Gardens, I found a booze shop and bought a quart of dark naval rum. Circling back around Queensway, I picked up some plastic cups at a grocer’s and then I went back to the room.

It was time to get drunk and think it over. The old ice in the trays was flecked and gray, but the rum camouflaged that nicely. I had a couple of belts and pounded on the window until I could open it. It was warm out, even for July, and clear. With some difficulty, I let down the bed. To accomplish that, the chairs had to be moved against the far wall. I dragged the table around to the head of the bed and set up the bottle and an ashtray within easy reach, then took off my shoes and lay down.

Halfway down my second cup of rum I began to feel a lot better. The jolly tar smiled at me from the bottle; he looked like a friendly sort. With the lights off I could forget the room and see only the darkening square of the window, and past it a single waving branch and a patch of sky. I was reasonably pleased with myself, so far. No one of any importance had the foggiest notion where I was anymore, and that made me happy, though for no clear reason. Since I hadn’t been visaed in France, it would take even Interpol an extra few minutes to pin me down. An enterprising person with the right connections could always trace me through the car rental, but I didn’t think that would apply to Kevin either way. So far as Kevin was concerned, I might as well have dropped off the face of the earth.

Would Kevin be worrying about me at all, though? I really doubted that. If he already knew I’d picked up the relay from Lauren, he probably wouldn’t be anything but pleased. He’d assume, in that half-conscious way of his, that things had worked out just the way he’d planned. He wouldn’t be fretting over me at all. It was maddening. When I hit the halfway mark on the rum bottle, it began to be sad too.

Why me? Why not Kevin? Why not both of us together? It wasn’t only a matter of wishing he’d do his own dirty work and leave me out. I actually missed the son of a bitch, strange as that might sound. Eyes closed, I constructed a montage of all the things we’d done together: shoots that ran for sleepless weeks, panic edits, late-night scheming of one thing or another, be it a movie or the real thing. Kevin’s quick flashes of insight that cut through so many difficulties. If he was a plague to me, he’d always been an inspiration too, and in a mood like this one, when I rode on the familiar adrenal surge that preceded the first serious move of any of our games, I wanted him with me or at least on my side. During the long charged moment when whatever we’d been brewing was finally committed to action, it had always seemed that nothing could come between us. I did miss him. I knew I could do the job without him, believed I could do it against him if it had to be that way, but it wasn’t going to be half as much fun.

T
HE MAIL CALL AT
American Express was the scariest thing on my agenda yet, enough so that my legs got rubbery during the walk from the tube to the office, and a couple of times they even tried to swivel out from under me and turn back. This time there really was something tangible to worry about. My only safety net was that those address labels were typed Italian style, with some minor variations on the spelling of my name, but that was thin. Extremely thin. It might just barely be enough to get me out of an indictment, but only after long hours or maybe days and weeks of slow frying in various interrogation rooms. I wasn’t looking forward to any of that.

But I went ahead to the office and once I was there it occurred to me that the box might not even have arrived yet, what with the Italian mail and all. But it had. The girl handling the mail that day looked to be about sixteen and was as cute as a button, reedy thin with honey-colored hair hanging down to her waist, and she didn’t appear to be the suspicious type. She forked over the package with a smile and no questions. I dropped it into a shopping bag I’d brought along in hopes that everything would work out this way, and then I got the hell out of there.

Clean as a whistle. For luck, I went straight over to Paddington Station. It seemed just as well if I put some space between picking up the box and booking my next passage to faraway romantic places. I dropped the parcel in the Paddington checkroom and then walked back down to Leinster Square. Up in the rented flat again, I sat down and wrote that letter I’d promised Mimmo. Then I remembered I probably couldn’t afford to mail it.

That pretty well took care of the serious business for the day. I went out and had a big soggy pub lunch and then went to the Islamic Room of the British Museum, where I killed most of the afternoon looking at incomprehensible calligraphy and things like that. Toward evening, I went back to American Express and booked on the next morning’s boat-train to Brussels. I’d thought of asking Miss Blondie out for a drink, but she seemed to have clocked out for the day, and besides, the Brits don’t talk to strangers much, and besides that, it would have been a poor moment, strategically speaking, to break my solitude.

So the next morning it was back to Dover, the reverse of the very same train ride I’d made two days before. If I wasn’t in the jet set, I was at least in the wheel set, or something like that. This time around I was prepared with an armload of newspapers and magazines. English, English, English. I gobbled it down. It didn’t matter very much that the news was not terrifically interesting for its own sweet sake. I hadn’t had any English for weeks and I didn’t know how long it might be before I got a chance to have any more.

This time around I was booked on a hydrofoil instead of the boat. It was faster but at the same time more boring. There was no deck. We were all strapped into our seats as if on an airplane. The water and sky spun by outside like a one-shot ribbon of film. I wanted to sleep but I was too jumpy for that. When the duty-free offer was made, I bought a good bottle of vodka for Racine.

It was at Ostend that the worst finally did happen, or almost. I got myself pulled out of the line over money, or at least that was the initial problem. So far as Belgian customs was concerned, it seemed that I had too much of it for the plausibility of my stated duration of visit (two weeks to a month) and purpose of visit (tourism, yet again). Two inspectors beckoned me not to a private room but simply to one side of the line for a more extensive conversation. They were speaking to each other in Flemish, which tended to rattle me. I might have followed their general drift in any of the Romance languages, but Flemish left me with no clue at all.

Of course there was a perfectly reasonable explanation of the money situation, which even had the virtue of relative truth: I was taking a long trip through several countries, I had earned money in Italy and converted it to traveler’s checks for ease and safety of transport, et cetera, et cetera. But my delivery was off and in the middle of it I noticed that, sure enough, my hands had begun to shake, and one of the customs men had already noticed it too. I’d had it. The second customs officer was already rooting through my shoulder bag while the first one, who spoke clumsy but authoritative English, recommended that I open the Halliburton.

It was as if someone had slapped me or dumped a bucket of ice water over my head. I calmed down at once.

“So sorry,” I said. “I’m afraid that will take up a lot of your time.”

“How?” said the customs man. He was rather unpleasant looking, I thought: yellow and lean, with a brush cut and an obnoxious pencil-line mustache.

“You see, the locks are broken,” I said. On a sudden inspiration, I set the combination dials to six digits of my New York phone number and snapped at the catches. Nothing happened, to be sure.

“So,” the customs man said. He was the laconic type, in English anyway. He tried the catches himself. Nothing doing.

“It’s been that way since yesterday,” I said. “Rust, maybe. I’ve had no time to repair it. If you could find a locksmith ...”

“Hm,” the customs man said. His partner had reclosed my shoulder bag. “And the contents?”

“Oh, only papers,” I said, with what I hoped was a hearty smile. After all, the statement was true in the literal sense. “Business papers, of no great interest to anyone but me.”

There was a brief exchange in Flemish. I decided it was time to push my luck a hair.

“Of course I realize you can’t very well just take my word for this,” I said. “And I will have to have it repaired very soon in any case. Only I would prefer not to damage the bag itself, it was rather expensive, you see. But if there is a locksmith nearby ... Of course I understand you have to inspect the contents. Only I do hope that I won’t miss my train ...”

The customs men spoke again in Flemish as I continued to babble in this vein. Finally the English speaker silenced me with a raised hand.

“Not necessary,” he said. He handed me back my bags and waved me through.

Kevin would have been proud of me for that one, I thought, and I did my best to be proud of myself, but that life-saving surge of confidence was gone now, as if it had never been. I was so limp that I literally stumbled as I moved out toward the train platforms, and finally I stopped and propped myself up on what turned out to be a letter drop. Once I noticed that, it occurred to me that it would be safe enough to mail Mimmo’s letter here; the Ostend postmark would be sufficiently misleading. So I slipped it in.
Bonne chance,
Mimmo. Then I looked over the signs and plotted my course out to the Brussels train.